Milton Keynes Basketball Club celebrated its 5th anniversary this year and to celebrate the return of senior basketball in the City – they now have a new club identity, logo and website too!
Founded in September 2017, the Milton Keynes Basketball Foundation was set up with a clear Mission Statement, to offer local boys and girls the opportunity to play basketball at both community and elite levels and to make Milton Keynes a major basketball destination in the UK.
Vi is delighted to be working with the club and like many in the City, we’re excited to see the club succeed in the coming seasons! 🏆
The founder and head coaches of Milton Keynes Basketball Club approached Visual Identity in the summer of 2022 – as they were looking to launch a brand new website to coincide with the re-introduction of senior men’s basketball in the City.
The club founder is keen to work with local businesses and support the local economy. He’d spoken to other suppliers but he’d heard of Vi and it was important that the club worked with a local supplier – which made Vi a great option, as we’re based just down the road from his office.
Whilst the website was the main project here, we were also commissioned to work on re-branding the club’s existing crest (logo) and a new nickname to go with it…
The club’s existing logo was beginning to look tired, and with the return of men’s basketball this year, the team saw an opportunity to re-brand in a big way.
The first task was finding a name. Most basketball clubs have ‘nicknames‘ for which they’re generally known; such as the Lakers, Rockets, Magic, Bulls, Knicks, Celtics… etc. The general theme here is to incorporate the team’s local heritage, or an aspect or tradition that the town/city is best known for.
The new name – ‘BREAKERS’ pays homage to the world-famous Codebreakers, and with our home court at Bletchley Leisure Centre less than one mile from Bletchley Park, we felt this was a perfect choice to recognise and honour the very best of Milton Keynes.
The design reflects the new name and incorporates a “cog” component from the famous “bombe” machine, invented by Alan Turing.
Clean lines, a new modern font, a ‘cog’ element and of course, the new name!
Our in-house web developers worked with the team to understand what they envisaged regarding the look and feel of the website and critical call-to-actions to consider.
The 4 key areas to include were sessions, leagues, men’s team, schools and news as well as ‘about us’ and a club kit ordering section, which will eventually be an online store.
It was also important for the client to be able to edit fixtures lists, league tables and results in the back end of the website. A huge benefit of choosing WordPress!
The roster functionality allows each of the clubs’ teams and age groups to have their own pages, which is nice for the younger players to see their profiles listed just the same as the senior teams.
We’ve also been able to provide more information on the different types of sessions the Breakers offer in the community and at schools, with on-page term timetables, and embedded Google maps.
Like all of our developments, the site is a mobile-first solution, where users can find out more about the club, book sessions, and check out the team rosters and league fixtures & results – using any mobile device.
Call to action’s such as ‘book a session’ and ‘join our club’ are bold and easy to find throughout the site, and link to external digital forms which have also been optimised for mobile use. This makes it easy for prospective players and parents/carers to quickly make an enquiry, even whilst on the move.
With any website launch, it’s crucial that web developers include key search terms in headers and content throughout the website, to ensure that the website appears in searches when (in this case) somebody searches “Basketball in Milton Keynes” e.g.
Vi uses industry-recognised tools and processes to review, optimise and ultimately improve rankings. This can take some time once a website is first launched, but if strategised correctly – a new website should be ranking well organically on ‘Google’ (for example) as they’re constantly ‘crawling’ to find the most relevant links.
Optimising for Voice Search is now equally as important, as one of the fastest-growing technologies over the last decade – more and more of us now use voice search tools such as Siri, Google and Alexa to find information for us. So this needs to be considered when working on website content.
The Results
Visit the website: https://mkbasketball.club/
